Disease Management Service Providers (DMSPs) are a growth sector on a worldwide scale as medical service providers. Their business concept is based primarily on education, development and motivation of patients combined with telemonitoring of critical body values and, consequently, early identification and avoidance of risk situations. Disease Management Services typically look after patients who are suffering from a widespread chronic disease, such as diabetes, asthma or hypertension, which means that large numbers of patients are looked after using a largely standardized treatment plan over long periods of time (typically months or years). This results in significant increased cost efficiency as compared with traditional patient care. In this case, this cost efficiency is achieved, inter alia, by the greatest possible degree of automation of the patient care, for example as a result of patient training material automatically being sent at stipulated intervals, advisory calls being made, or measured values, such as the patient's blood pressure, being sent in digital form to a control center where they are automatically assessed and, in the event of limit values being exceeded or not reached, a fax or an e-mail containing an appropriate recommended treatment is sent to the physician providing the care.
Generally, the costs for this form of patient care are borne by the health insurance companies. These are increasingly demanding evidence of the long-term cost efficiency of such intervention from the DMSPs. Since the pathologies for which care is provided are essentially those where the patients need to change habitual but unhealthy behavior (for example stopping smoking, changing diet etc.), the desired success can be achieved only by providing the patient with an insight into and an understanding of his situation. For this reason, patient education, that is to say working through the appropriate training material and comprehension of its content, is of particular importance.
Hence, in order to be able to answer the very important question of whether the patient to be treated has a) received his assigned training material and b) has studied it and also understood it as specified, the service provider has no other option to date than to subject the patient to a telephone assessment which, depending on the kind of patient, can be very complex and laborious.
On the other hand, the DMSP cannot dispense with this practice, since firstly it is a form of care documentation for health insurance companies, and secondly health insurance companies increasingly wish to pay out on the basis of success, and hence the service providers have particularly great motivation for the patient to internalize and implement the training material.